Wow, millighost! Impressive. I must try it when I have time. Looks very promising!

Another possibility is to insert a plane and then use snapping to move vertexes to that plane. Kind of handmade Booleans... :)

Damn, you got here first. It's practically on every site I visit. So probably it will be successful campaign.

Btw, it's even available (using Wine) in Linux!

Btw, I had to rig something with Armature modifier and vertex groups in 2.55 and I must say that it has really working nicely now.

You just define vertex groups with the same names as your bones and voila, Armature modifier begins to work.

It might be one way to solve mechanical movement, I used Weight value 1.0 with all vertexes which is, well, hard surface stuff.

Nice thing, which I have not tested, but I assume that should work, is that you can use one Armature skeleton with several models/meshes, so if you develop poses for one mesh, they might work with others... Of course you probably need to "fit" the Armature with each model.

edit: typos

Umm... apologies.

It seems that at least some 'official' beta packages have had problems with OBJ import. I do not know that which ones, but if in doubt, you can find ready-compiled new packages from www.GraphicAll.org .

I'm too much tinkerer to be a lot of help, it seems. :-/

edit: ... and seems that new 'official' beta is coming around 26.12. Just a rumour, mind you.

• crawls back to retopologize female anatomy *

There's multitude of reason to see "nothing". Usual problem is that the modeler makes things, say, thousand times bigger than Blender's scale. What you see is insides of the object, that may look quite gray... Or then again, objects is so tiny that you see nothing. Hit 'S' key and see what happens...

Btw that image is quick random modeling in Sketchup 8 Pro, some boolean / solid tools stuff. Imported as OBJ, then curved surfaces smoothed a bit.

Basic question: what if your model is in such scale that you can't SEE what you imported?

Numerous ways to correct, hint 'S' is for scale...

I've imported my Sketchup 8 Pro files in Blender 2.55 (some not-old svn self-compiled version). I've had no problems.

My OS is Ubuntu Linux, where I'm using Windoze version of Sketchup via Wine... ;-)

edit: typos

I don't have any problems using Windows, I just don't have it installed now... But I have Ubuntu. ;-)

I might try wine. MapZone I have used earlier, when I had XP.

VM install might be possible, or I might stay with original plan and purchase new hard disk and then have Win7 with that...

Krita, btw, is developing quite positively, 2.2.2 is already quite good and newer releases will be even better...

But if you need a painting application in Linux, Mypaint is THE app currently. Well working brush engine, canvas can be rotated and all. Then you need GIMP for finalising, 2.7.1 seems to be quite stable in my rig.

Yeah, there quite many possibilities...

Very smooth looking. Funny critters...

Yes, exactly, object rotates around it's center, but you can (in 3D view basic UI, same in 2.4x and 2.5x) click different rotation systems to be used. For example, moving or rotating camera is much easier, if you use Normal. Global is probably the default.

When using Normal, the rotation is not base (global) X/Y/Z but it's based on objects own location and rotation.

Sorry, if I'm confusing, this is much, much, easier to show than to describe...

One more thought, you ARE aware of Normal rotation, so local rotation base is used? Just a click more, solves some drudgery... (Just a thought, I was re-reading your posting...)

I can see some of your points (I think), but I have done something similar with just parenting... I resorted to numerical input sometimes. It's not very sophisticated, but on mechanical models it's sometimes working well. I wouldn't want to model organic movement numerically, that's way too complicated.

There were some discussions that latest versions have some bugs in automatic mode (i.e. old "heat" system) in 2.54, so some strange issues may occur... Blenderartists has some information.

I hope they'll get animation working soon, it'd be a pity to go back 2.49 for bugs. Ah well, beta is beta, but at least devs are quite active.

Now, is there something for Linux? Of course there are some plugins for GIMP. But anything else?

Attached Link: http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/19-ffmpeg-commands-for-all-needs

I compile png-files to mpeg2 (dvd)-format often. Jpg and avi should be supported AFAIK.

Three small projects with 2.54 (self-compiled SVN version)  in Ubuntu Linux done, no crashes and no bugs found so far. Probably I'm too n00b to make anything complicated enough.

Basic modeling, UV mapping and rendering works. Some small animations work also, but I haven't tried anything advanced...

Oh, and sculpting just rocks!